CHAPTER 45

Farewell to CNN

BY LATE 2003, the hottest prospect to become George W. Bush’s Democratic challenger was Dr. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who became the first presidential candidate to harness the Internet for agit-prop, fund-raising, and organizing. I wrote column after column exposing Dean’s radical, erratic foibles and wondering how the world’s oldest political party could walk off the cliff with him.

As I arrived at the Des Moines airport on January 7, I ran into one of the nation’s best political reporters who had spent weeks in the state. “Dean’s got Iowa locked up,” he said. “It looks like he’s got the nomination locked up, too, doesn’t it?” I shrugged, saying I really had not yet been on the ground in Iowa. What I didn’t say was that my instinct told me that Dean had peaked and was on his way down. Instinct sometimes trumps shoe-leather reporting.

Beyond instinct, I had the advice of Bob Shrum, the Kerry campaign’s strategist. Bob said reporters were underestimating Kerry and I should give him a close look. I was no more entranced than I had been when I first met Kerry thirty years earlier as a radical Vietnam Veteran Against the War. His greatest asset now was that he could appeal to liberal voters growing disenchanted with Dean. Kerry won Iowa with Dean third, and roared into New Hampshire to win there and sweep nearly all the other primaries.

         

ON MAY 8, 2004, I received my third honorary degree: doctor of humane letters, from the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois. My previous two honorary doctorates were from Kenyon College in 1987 and the University of Illinois in 1998. I was too much of a right-winger for most of America’s institutions. Those that did honor me had a special connection.

Both of our children graduated from Kenyon as political science majors, and I had attended public affairs seminars at the Ohio college dating back thirty years. Zelda received her degree on the same day I was honored. The Mount Vernon [Ohio] News published a photo showing me, a smiling, applauding father in academic robes as his daughter crossed the stage, diploma in hand. Zelda later said it was just like me to horn in on her big moment.

St. Francis was honoring a hometown Joliet boy who was a Catholic convert. I began my commencement address by noting that long ago whenever I passed the then all-women’s College of St. Francis, I “always took a good look at it. For a young Jewish boy, it was a place of mystery. I wondered: What went on with those Catholic girls?” That generated nervous twitters from the assembled clergy. Then I got serious:

I encountered considerable criticism when I delivered the commencement address at my alma mater, the University of Illinois a few years ago. I offered this advice to the graduates then, which I now repeat to you: Always love your country—but never trust your government!

That should not be misunderstood. I certainly am not advocating civil disobedience, much less insurrection or rebellion. What I am advocating is to not expect too much from government and be wary of its power, even the power of a democratic government in a free country.

Ours is one of the mildest, most benevolent governments in the world. But it too has the power to take your wealth and forfeit your life. So, follow the teaching of St. Francis in being generous as a private citizen but be wary of the power of government. A government that can give you everything can take everything away.

The first time I advised young people to love their country but not trust their government was in 1994 at a Bullis School graduation in Potomac, Maryland, where I was the board of trustees vice president. After the ceremony when I was taking off my academic robe, a grim harridan approached me, identified herself as a George Washington University faculty member, and told me that comments such as mine had just led to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Four years later, I came in for criticism by employing the same formulation at the University of Illinois commencement. Because the 17,456 seating capacity of Assembly Hall was not large enough for all the graduates and guests, I had to deliver my address to two commencement ceremonies. The first group, mainly students from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, reacted tepidly to my advice. The second group, from the Commerce and Engineering schools, cheered lustily.

Six years later at St Francis, I again delivered my commencement address twice, in a much smaller auditorium—first to graduate students and then to undergraduates. The graduate students received my injunction in deadly silence. The undergrads cheered and clapped. I hoped that did not mean that too much education was to be avoided.

The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, a small conservative school in Merrimack, New Hampshire, scheduled me for a commencement speech and honorary degree in May 2006. I tried to speak in the spirit of my patron saint, Saint Thomas More, when he was visited in prison by his successor as chancellor of England, the egregious Thomas Cromwell. More was offered a return to his previous high office if he would only submit to King Henry VIII. He replied that he no longer wished to exist in the world of power, telling Cromwell: “My whole study shall be upon the passion of Christ.” Addressing the graduates, I recalled those words and added my admonition about never trusting their government, to universal acclaim at this small college.

         

AS HE BEGAN his acceptance speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, the nominee snapped off a military salute: “I am John Kerry, and I am reporting for duty!”

My intuition was that Kerry was making a mistake playing the military card, but I did not realize how much he delivered himself into Republican hands until the Democratic convention was nearly finished. I was on the last Crossfire show from Boston on Thursday, July 29, when I broke a story. Greg Mueller, a right-wing publicist, tipped me about a forthcoming TV ad by some of Kerry’s fellow Vietnam War swift boat veterans challenging his war record. Carville and Begala scoffed on the air, but I thought I detected unease on their part.

There was a further development I did not mention on the July 29 Crossfire. The conservative publishing house Regnery was about to publish Unfit for Command, a scathing deconstruction of Kerry’s war record co-authored by John O’Neill, Kerry’s fellow swift boat skipper and longtime critic. Like most Regnery books, Unfit for Command was not widely reviewed. But thanks to promotion on talk radio and discussion on the Internet, the book’s sales forced repeated new printings that propelled it to the top of the best-seller lists.

A fellow swift boat veteran had turned up in Iowa before the caucuses to tell a story of how Lieutenant Kerry saved his life in Vietnam, and two of Kerry’s enlisted crew members also vouched for his heroism. But Kerry’s fellow naval officers who contributed to O’Neill’s book insisted that the presidential candidate’s war record was spurious, and there was documentation to support them. I contacted these critics, including a former naval medical officer who told me that he treated the wound suffered by Kerry for the first of his three Purple Hearts and that it was “only a scratch.” The doctor added that enlisted men had described John Forbes Kerry vowing he would “come out of the war as the next JFK.”

Cable television’s combative talk shows were anxious to air this debate. Instead of putting on the former enlisted men in Kerry’s crew who claimed firsthand experience of the long-ago incidents, the Kerry campaign used as its spokesman the Washington lawyer Lanny Davis. Davis did not really know the details and had not even looked at Unfit for Command when he went on TV and began making factual errors.

Davis had read the book by the time he confronted John O’Neill on Crossfire on August 12, with me as the conservative host. I always had liked Lanny but in a column of August 16, I wrote: “Bill Clinton’s calm advocate had become a shouter for Kerry who accused critics of being liars.” That was an understatement. On Crossfire Davis interrupted O’Neill with screaming denunciations. After the show, I apologized to O’Neill for this experience and Davis apologized to me for going over the line.

Lawyer Davis tried to reduce conflicting testimony down to a simple issue: credibility. He insisted nobody who actually was in a boat with Kerry when he was wounded ever joined the veterans attacking his war record. In Unfit for Command, O’Neill asserted that Lieutenant William Schachte (who would retire as a rear admiral) was aboard a small Boston whaler with Kerry on Kerry’s first combat mission on December 2, 1968. Repeating on Crossfire what he wrote in the book, O’Neill said Schachte “witnessed Kerry, with an M-79 [grenade launcher], fire it and wound himself.” O’Neill could barely get out those words before Davis interrupted him, yelling: “That was a false statement!”

Davis was relying on the memories of two enlisted men who appeared with Kerry on the podium at the Democratic National Convention. They said there was no other officer aboard the boat thirty-five years earlier. They repeated that when I phoned them, but neither knew whether there was enemy fire or how Kerry was wounded.

Since Davis was basing Kerry’s overall credibility on whether Schachte was aboard the Boston whaler, I thought it imperative to get hold of the admiral. After some difficulty, I contacted him at his home in Charleston, South Carolina, on Thursday, August 26, the week before the Republican National Convention convened in New York. Schachte told me he was politically independent, had not been contacted by the Bush campaign or any Republican organization, and did not want to get involved. But after watching Lanny Davis’s tirade on Crossfire, he told me, he had to speak out.

The admiral described to me Kerry’s first taste of combat in the early morning of December 2, 1968, when the Boston whaler (he called it a “skimmer”) operated close to the Mekong River shore in a technique that Schachte had designed. Schachte said that Kerry’s M-16 rifle jammed and the new officer picked up an M-79 grenade launcher. “I heard a ‘thunk,’” he said. “There was no fire from the enemy. Kerry nicked himself with an M-79. Kerry requested a Purple Heart.”

But was Schachte really aboard Kerry’s boat? “I was absolutely in the skimmer,” he told me. It “was not possible,” he said, for Kerry to have been the only officer aboard the Boston whaler on his first combat mission. I phoned two other officers, one of them Schachte’s commander, who both said Schachte always was aboard the skimmer on such missions. The commanding officer said he had told Kerry to “forget it” when he asked for a Purple Heart, and the other officer said Schachte had told him the wound was not enemy-inflicted. All this I reported in a “bonus” column for Friday, August 27.

During this period, I learned the Kerry campaign was furious at me and was preparing a counterattack. Instead of rebutting what I had said or written, Kerry agents started leaking to reporters the fact that my son Alex worked for Regnery. I counted the days before I would hear from Jacques Steinberg, who covered the media for the New York Times.

The call from Steinberg came August 27, the day my interview with Admiral Schachte ran in the New York Post. Steinberg indicated he was planning a big takeout on me and had many questions that included one about my son. The question about Alex turned out to be all he wrote about me—a 153-word item in his “MediaTalk” column on Monday, August 30. Noting that I had commended Unfit for Command and John O’Neill, Steinberg wrote: “Unmentioned in Mr. Novak’s columns and television appearances, however, is a personal connection he has to the book: his son, Alex Novak, is director of marketing for its publisher, the conservative publishing house Regnery. In a telephone interview, Robert Novak said he saw no need to disclose this link. ‘I don’t think it’s relevant,’ he said.”

A few days later I was called by the Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt, who gently suggested I might want to disclose that link in one of my columns that ran in the Post. On September 6, this ran as a footnote to my column:

In response to queries by readers: My son, Alex Novak, is director of marketing for Regnery Publishing Inc., publisher of “Unfit for Command.” He is 36 years old and has been employed at Regnery for six years, since receiving his MBA from the University of Maryland. He has had no connection with my reporting about “Unfit for Command,” a best-selling book dealing with Sen. Kerry’s war record whose news value is obvious. I plan to continue to pursue this story as developments warrant.

NEW YORK WAS a strange place for a Republican convention in 2004. The anti-Republican, anti-Bush animus created what I described in the column as the most “unpleasant” atmosphere I had seen at any national political convention (worse than the Chicago Democratic convention of 1968). On the streets of Manhattan, delegates (and reporters who were mistaken for delegates) were called “Nazis,” “fascists,” and worse. I got special treatment, as I wrote in a postconvention column:

Many demonstrators recognized me from my TV appearances and condemned me as a “traitor” because of the CIA leak case, some suggesting I should kill myself. I had to resort to using a security escort to move a short distance to fulfill commitments for CNN.

Anytime I set foot on the streets of the city, I encountered abusive and obscene shouts. But it did not begin in New York.

Outdoors in the freezing cold at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Paul Begala and I were waiting to do Crossfire live when a plump, smiley, forty-something Iowa matron approached Begala to tell him how much she liked Crossfire. She told him she would like to meet me, and Paul obliged. When I extended my arm to shake hands, she withheld hers and said: “You’re a traitor—a traitor! You should be in prison!”

When the Democratic candidates and Crossfire moved from Iowa to New Hampshire, an unemployed anti-Bush activist named Brad Carr was there to stalk me. As Begala and I were shooting Crossfire at the Merrimack Diner in Manchester on primary day, January 27, Carr positioned himself behind the camera, repeatedly shouting “traitor” and “scumbag”—two of the Left’s favorite epithets for me. He followed me out of the diner as the Crossfire crew walked toward the CNN bus. Screaming obscenities, he then gave me a hard shove. Infuriated I turned and half swung, half shoved back. At age fifty-four, he was eighteen years my junior and a good deal stockier. But in the scuffle, he went down.

Anti-Bush bloggers on the Internet made this the day’s big story, eclipsing Kerry’s New Hampshire victory. Takebackthemedia.com headlined: “Bob Novak assaults man in New Hampshire! Contact CNN and tell them you don’t like it!” I thought the little incident had escaped mainstream news media attention until I got a call a week later from the Washington Post gossip columnist Richard Leiby saying that Carr might file assault charges against me if I did not apologize. I replied: “I’m sorry it happened—if that’s an apology.” Carr did not press charges, but I never thought he would.

It was not just anonymous hecklers who gave me trouble about the CIA leak case when I was on the road. I was attending a New York Times party the weekend before the Democratic convention in Boston when I found myself in close proximity to John McLaughlin. I had not talked to McLaughlin for many years, but John put his face close to mine, and without a single word of salutation, asked: “Who was your source on Valerie Plame?” I put my mouth to his ear and said: “Fuck you!” McLaughlin issued his familiar cackle as I walked away.

         

I HAD TRIMMED my political travel in 2000, and now in 2004 at age seventy-three, I planned to cut back more. However, what happened on the early morning of September 31 demolished even limited travel plans.

I was in Coral Gables, Florida, on Thursday, September 30, for the first Bush-Kerry debate at the University of Miami. Bush, not much of a debater at his best, was at his worst at Coral Gables. It was past eleven o’clock when I got back to the Hyatt Regency, and I intended to go straight to my room to start my column for Monday’s newspapers. But the Republican pollster Frank Luntz, in the lobby cocktail lounge, gave me the high sign. Luntz told me he had fascinating results from his debate focus groups. I sat down for my first drink of the day and learned Bush may have done even worse than I believed. Luntz’s ordinary voters were turned off by the Bush smirk and his complaining that the presidency was such “hard work.”

I got to my room exhausted, shortly before midnight, anticipating a short night. I had agreed to be a panelist discussing the 2004 campaign the next day at the annual conference in Aspen, Colorado, put on by Forstman Little, the New York investment banking firm. Teddy Forstman was sending a private jet to fly me to Colorado, with a limo picking me up at the Hyatt Regency at six a.m. for a seven o’clock takeoff. I caught a little sleep before getting up early to begin my column. I answered a three thirty a.m. wakeup call, and began the column under a Coral Gables dateline:

Depression among Democrats had reached new depths when the presidential candidates faced off Thursday night at the University of Miami. An hour and a half later, they were elated that John Kerry’s candidacy had been saved. But none of the Democratic candidate’s shortcomings had been corrected.

Rather, the rise in Democratic spirits can be attributed to George W. Bush’s defects in the first presidential debate. His stylistic deficiencies as a candidate in 2000, it turns out, have not been remedied. He was anything but relentless in exploiting his opponent’s multiple weaknesses.

The gap in performance here between Bush and Kerry hardly seemed wide enough to reverse the popular tide that had been flowing in the President’s direction. Nevertheless, it was enough to still the exuberant optimism in Republican ranks. With two more debates and a month to go before the election, Bush has serious problems to solve.

By five a.m., I had written about half the 690-word column, and went into the spacious bathroom of my deluxe bedroom to shave and then take my usual long shower. It was just before five thirty when I emerged from the shower, sopping wet, and fell on the wet tile floor.

The pain was intense, and I knew from past experience that I had broken my hip—the right one this time. The shower, where I had fallen, was at the far end of the long bathroom. To my horror, I discovered there was no phone in the bathroom, unusual for a luxury hotel. My cell phone was far away in the bedroom.

Wracked with pain, I decided my only course was to crawl naked and crippled to the bedside phone. That entailed inching my way down the entire length of the bathroom, then turning when I arrived in the bedroom to crawl the same distance to the phone. Fire department paramedics, summoned by the hotel and arriving quickly, expressed astonishment that I (meaning an old guy like me) could have made that journey.

The emergency room at Doctors Hospital was empty and the hospital staff could not have been more efficient or more courteous. Dr. Jack Cooper, one of South Florida’s top orthopedic surgeons, recommended a hip replacement but waited to perform the operation until Geraldine could fly down from Washington. I had been through three cancer surgeries, spinal meningitis and multiple broken bones. But never before had I experienced such agony as I did at Coral Gables. Complications abounded, including a blood clot in my leg. But Dr. Cooper and the other physicians were terrific.

Groggy as I was, I still had my Monday column to wrap up. That meant I had to finish the column on Saturday writing on my laptop from my hospital bed the day after surgery. I found it hard to write without typos, and I repeatedly dozed off. It took me more than four hours to write the final 350 words of the column. The final version read no worse than usual, concluding: “Can a front-runner really lose the election because of poor debating skills? He might if the debate exposes the candidate’s basic flaws. That’s why Bush supporters are worried about the town hall debate Friday in St. Louis.” (Bush did well enough in that debate and the third debate at Mesa, Arizona, to remove oratorical skills as a major factor in the election.)

On Friday, October 15, one week after my surgery, a flying ambulance transported me to Washington’s Dulles airport. It was a small jet in which Geraldine, a paramedic, and a nurse crowded in around my stretcher. An ambulance took me to the George Washington University Hospital, where I would spend another week before I could go home.

Being in a hospital bed did not keep me from making calls to political sources and writing my three-a-week column. CNN executive producer Sam Feist had me join the network’s analysts, via telephone, after the Friday night presidential debate. It was my first night at GW, and I felt lousy. After the debate, I had to undergo a complete blood transfusion that kept me awake much of the night.

The high point of my stay at GW came when Zelda brought me a tape of one of my favorite movies, The Leopard (1962) starring Burt Lancaster. She rented the much superior Italian-language version (with subtitles) instead of the English dub. It is a neglected masterpiece, perhaps because of its conservative theme. Its hero is a nineteenth-century Sicilian nobleman who deplores the affectations of the risorgimento’s bourgeois politicians and liberal reformers. It rings true to me after observing firsthand a half century of sophistry.

         

BY ELECTION DAY 2004 on November 2, I was still wheelchair-bound but had recovered sufficiently to go to New York (by chauffeur-driven sedan) to join my three Crossfire cohorts on CNN’s coverage that night. It was a close election, but careful tracking of the electoral vote by the Evans-Novak Political Report never had Bush behind—even after his horrid performance at Coral Gables. Yet, the other three Crossfire hosts all publicly predicted a Kerry win. Carville and Begala, of course, did so as a matter of theology. But Tucker Carlson, I believe, was a hard-core McCain backer who just did not like Bush. I don’t think he ever broke down the 2004 campaign state by state but delivered his gut opinion that Bush was a loser.

When Geraldine and I arrived at the CNN studios in the Time-Warner building, a celebration was in place. Early exit polls suggested a Kerry landslide, reversing Bush’s 2000 wins in Ohio and Florida—in Ohio by a huge margin. CNN staffers were ecstatic. I got Bob Shrum on the phone, and he was in a state of delight. Knowing I had to rehash the election for Thursday’s newspapers, Bob was only too happy to list the mistakes by Bush and Karl Rove that led to their demise.

But, as in 2002, the exit polls were wrong. The Evans-Novak Political Report, in contrast, was as close to being perfect as it ever had been. ENPR’s heavy lifting for 2004 was done by Tim Carney, maybe my best political reporter since I began hiring them in 1982. We were wrong on only two out of fifty states, calling it 276 to 262 in electoral votes compared to the actual outcome of 286 to 252. We missed only one out of thirty-seven Senate races, forecasting a Republican gain of three seats instead of the actual four. Out of 430 contested House seats, we missed two that cancelled each other out so that the ENPR was right on the three-seat Republican pickup.

How could we be so right and the Democrats so wrong? They could not blame exit polls, because Democrats had been predicting victory for weeks. I gave my explanation in my Thursday column, written on deadline in my New York hotel room Wednesday morning after a long election night:

Rove was correct and Democrats guessed wrong in guessing the American mood. A symptom was Democratic belief that former Rep. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Rep. Jim DeMint in South Carolina were just too conservative to defeat moderate Democrats for the Senate. In fact, each won easily.

The electorate is simply too conservative for the Democrats, as shown by the defeat of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota. The formula of taking the straight liberal line in Washington and talking conservative at home does not work when a Democrat’s every move becomes visible as a member of the leadership.

The gradual political realignment, which I had been watching for four decades and writing about in this memoir almost from the beginning, reached its apex on election day, November 2, 2004. Not only did President Bush carry all eleven states of the old Confederacy, but eighteen of the region’s twenty-two senators now were Republicans after the gain of previously Democratic-held seats in Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina. “Domination of Congress by the GOP now enters its second decade,” I wrote, “with Democrats largely restricted to enclaves on both coasts and some Midwestern industrial states.”

I did not write, however, that all realignment comes to an end and begins to erode when the majority party runs out of things to say. I felt that time was fast approaching.

         

GEORGE W. BUSH was off to a slow start in his second term. He chose not to reconstruct his cabinet, did not order a quick withdrawal from Iraq to let the Iraqis sort out their own problems, and did not put flesh on the bare bones of his Social Security and tax reform initiatives. In contrast, Jonathan Klein, the new president of CNN/US (announced on November 22, 2004), moved quickly to effect dramatic change.

Former CBS executive Jon Klein was well known in the Manhattan-Hollywood TV world, but I had never heard of him. I would come to regard Klein as less interested in politics and government than any other major news executive I had known. But he was familiar with the Crossfire of Friday, October 15, 2004, which turned out to be one of the most influential broadcasts in the program’s twenty-three-year history. The producers booked a single guest: Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, a popular program on the cable network Comedy Central.

Stewart was the first comedian to be on Crossfire except for entertainers like Mark Russell brought in for holiday programs. While Russell was a good-natured tweaker of Republicans and Democrats, Stewart was a left-wing ideologue obsessed with demeaning President Bush. A secondary target for Stewart was Crossfire in general and me in particular because of the CIA leak case.

If I was Stewart’s principal Crossfire target, why wasn’t I—instead of Tucker Carlson—the conservative host questioning him October 15? First, at the hour when Stewart sat across from Begala and Carlson at George Washington University’s Morton Auditorium, I was a couple blocks away in a bed at GW Hospital awaiting a blood transfusion. Second, I am sure the producers knew that I never would have appeared on the program with Stewart and would have vigorously argued against scheduling him. I thought booking Stewart constituted a cheap grab for ratings, a mind-set hastening the decline of Crossfire.

Smart as he is, Tucker Carlson never anticipated he was walking into an ambush. Stewart took Carlson and Begala to the cleaners, telling them to “stop, stop, stop hurting America” and pleading for more “civilized discourse” on television’s political programs. “You are partisan—what do you call it?—hacks,” he told my colleagues.

The morning papers of January 6, 2005, reported Klein announcing cancellation of Crossfire at an undetermined time in the near future (it would be June 1). It was not just that Klein axed Crossfire unexpectedly but what he said in doing so. In talking to the nation’s writers covering the news media, he repeatedly quoted and endorsed Jon Stewart’s criticism of what had been CNN’s longest-standing daily feature that still attracted relatively high ratings even though it had been withdrawn from prime time. “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise,” Klein said, adding he was opposed to “head-butting debate” and referred to Crossfire as “a bunch of guys screaming at each other.” He broke the old rule that a TV executive does not denigrate his own product—even after he has cancelled it.

At the same time, Klein revealed that Tucker Carlson was leaving and gave the impression that he was being fired (“We just determined there was not a role here in the way Tucker wanted his career to go.”). Actually I can testify that Carlson had become very unhappy. He had wanted to leave the previous April but had been prevailed on to stay through the 2004 elections and now had cut a deal with MSNBC for his own program. Reversing the old saw, CNN seemed to be saying to Tucker: “You can’t quit! You’re fired!” Most newspaper accounts suggested that Carlson had been sacked, except for the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, who concluded correctly: “Carlson’s defection was a coup for MSNBC.”

Kurtz’s January 6 account contained additional news that no one else had: “The network also plans to end Capital Gang, the long-running Saturday night panel show created by Novak, later this year” ( June 25, as it turned out). That was an even bigger surprise to everybody, including me, than the Crossfire cancellation. The program’s rating still led all CNN weekend programs, and was one of the network’s rare presentations that was competitive with high-flying Fox in its time slot. Capital Gang never had been accused, as Crossfire was, of being a shout program. It was popular in Washington. So why kill it? The answer was that Jon Klein just did not like politics. Inside Politics, also quite popular in Washington, was scheduled for the axe after its moderator, Judy Woodruff, left CNN.

Klein talked publicly about getting CNN into “roll up your sleeves story-telling” and said CNN on-air personalities should have more of the Bronx in them. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I doubt Klein knew exactly what he wanted beyond an end to political talk on his network. When the left-wing editorial voice of the New York Times praised Klein for siding with a comedian against Crossfire, there was no stopping him. Whenever asked, he would talk publicly about rebuilding CNN through deconstruction of its political shows.

“It’s gotten to the point,” I told Klein on February 17, “where I am embarrassed being associated with CNN.” That was hyperbole, but I also regarded it as my tacit letter of resignation from the network I had served for a quarter century if Klein chose to accept it that way. It didn’t worry me. Donald Regan used to talk about “f-u money”—about having enough money in the bank that you could say “f-u” to your boss and walk out. I believe Regan, in terms of 2005, would be talking about upward of fifty million dollars. While I was not even faintly close to that category, as a journalist I had accumulated—to my surprise, at age seventy-four—a net worth in the high single-digit millions. I did not need the job.

But Klein did not respond by firing me or even rebuking me. “We venerate you for all you have done for us,” he told me with a straight face. Actually, the end of my CNN tenure was in sight.

The next time I heard from Klein came one morning the next month with a call placed to my cell phone. In my previous meetings, the CNN president’s voice had been calm and friendly. Now he sounded frantic. “Why would you do this?” he asked. “It is wrong to attack the company’s decisions in public.” He was talking about a quote attributed to me in “What About Novak?” a forthcoming Vanity Fair profile by David Margolick. I replied that I had not yet seen the magazine and could not even remember what I told my interviewer. That was the absolute truth, but I think Klein was incredulous as he quickly terminated the conversation.

What had I told Margolick, a hostile left-wing journalist who had interviewed me in my office? When I located a copy of Vanity Fair, I found this paragraph:

He [Novak] faults CNN president Jonathan Klein for endorsing Jon Stewart’s criticism of Crossfire, which helped kill the show. “I thought it was stupid, and that’s on the record,” he says…. He ridicules CNN’s folly in canceling what he insists are two highly rated programs.

That’s all there was that had so antagonized Klein. The message was that he was more interested in his public image than anything else.

As I have made clear in this memoir, my attitude toward Crossfire always had been ambivalent. My affection for Capital Gang, on the other hand, was unequivocal and unconditional. I think its regular viewers were disconsolate, evidenced by thousands of e-mails protesting the cancellation.

After the program’s demise was decreed, I called the Fox News Channel chief Roger Ailes to see if he had any interest in Capital Gang. He had been eager for the program eight years earlier when he nearly outbid CNN for my services, but not now. He explained politely that Fox, which had come from far behind against CNN in 1997 ratings to enjoy a widening lead in 2005, had a set program schedule that he did not want to alter. I next asked my Gang colleagues whether they wanted me to try to find a home elsewhere for the program, and they said they did not.

CNN wanted to do a big Washington farewell party for us, but my colleagues had a sour taste and declined. Instead, Al Hunt put on a terrific party at his and his wife Judy Woodruff’s large home in the Cleveland Park section of Washington. Many of the big-name Capital Gang guests attended. They included the guest for our pilot, Ambassador Robert S. Strauss, and the guest at our first program, former Speaker Thomas Foley. They included CNN staffers, headed by producer Deborah Nelson—all of whom worked so hard for Capital Gang. They did not include any CNN executives from Washington, Atlanta, or New York.

         

WITH THE DEMISE of Crossfire and Capital Gang, I was down to one regularly scheduled CNN program, the seven-minute The Novak Zone, which would be cancelled at the end of July. My other duty was to come in a couple of afternoons each week and be paired off with a liberal in what CNN billed as the Strategy Session.

Notwithstanding Klein’s attitude toward Crossfire, CNN was wedded to the Right-versus-Left format for commentators and was not going to let me appear alone. I objected to the Strategy Session rubric for my duel with liberals. I was a reporter and an analyst, not a political strategist. It was explained to me that the Strategy Session graphics had already been prepared. At least, I asked, could I be excused from appearing opposite Carville or Begala, who indeed were Democratic strategists? They would try, I was told.

With annual escalators, my yearly pay from CNN had reached $625,000 (my largest single source of income). That was not out of line in the world of cable television considering the workload I was carrying before the cancellation of Crossfire, Capital Gang, and The Novak Zone. But after they were all gone, I was overpaid.

When Klein appeared before the Television Critics Association in Beverly Hills, California, on July 17, the very first question was: “Why does Robert Novak continue to be employed by CNN?” He answered “It would be awfully presumptuous of us to take steps against a guy and his career based on second, third, fourth-handed reporting.” What that meant I have no idea. When Klein called me “one of the most outstanding political reporters this country has ever known,” I felt like the baseball manager who gets a vote of confidence from the owner just before he is fired.

         

ON AUGUST 4, 2005, I made what had become an increasingly rare appearance on CNN. The network had decided not to put me on any day when there was the slightest morsel of news about the CIA leak case since I would not answer any questions about it. That meant a majority of my Strategy Session appearances were cancelled.

The news of August 4 was leak-free, so I was scheduled to go on CNN. The problem was that I was paired with James Carville. Producers explained that Carville was the only person available August 4, and against my better judgment, I agreed to go ahead.

I was told that Ed Henry, CNN’s young congressional correspondent, was anchoring that afternoon and would end the session by asking me just one question about the leak case based on my July 27 column: Did I really get Valerie Plame’s name from Who’s Who in America? I had revealed this fact many times dating back to 2003, and I figured there was no harm in revealing it once again.

As Carville and I waited to go on the air, I told him that I had heard his friend, the sports columnist Tony Kornheiser, comment on the radio that I was always sucking up to George W. Bush. I enjoyed Kornheiser’s wit, but he was a reflexive liberal who knew nothing about politics. When I asked Carville to set Kornheiser straight about me, James replied: “Well, hasn’t he got that right?” Carville, of course, was well aware of my frequent criticism of Bush. As wild as he was on camera, James usually was civilized in private conversation. If he was playing the Ragin’ Cajun off-camera this day, I should have been prepared for the worst.

It came near the end of our segment when Carville rejoiced over news that the controversial congresswoman Katherine Harris now appeared assured of the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Florida. Carville launched an abusive, sarcastic attack on her. “Don’t be too sure she’s going to lose,” I said. As I tried to offer my theory that antiestablishment Republicans often do better than expected, Carville interrupted, in his high-pitched Louisiana accent, to claim I was trying to curry favor with the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. I had been under the impression that James was not supposed to launch these tirades under the new Strategy Session format. “Just let me finish what I’m going to say, James,” I said. “Please, I know you hate to hear me, but you have—” Before I could finish that, a shouting Carville overrode what I had to say. “He’s got to show these right-wingers that he’s got backbone,” Carville yelled. “Show them you’re tough.” Two and one-half years of coping with Carville’s ad hominem attacks welled up in me. “Well, I think that’s bullshit,” I said. “And I hate that. Just let it go.” I removed my microphone and stalked off the set.

At the end of the segment, Henry said: “I’m sorry as well that Bob Novak obviously left the set a little early. I had told him in advance that we were going to ask him about the CIA leak case.” I could not believe that he was suggesting I left the set to avoid being asked about Who’s Who. A few minutes later, I asked Henry why in the world he would say that about me on the air. “What else was I to think?” he asked. I had been dubious when the obsequious Henry told me how thrilled he was to work with an old pro like me, and now my suspicions were confirmed that he was a duplicitous phony.

I apologized immediately to CNN management, but the network’s public statement called my conduct “unacceptable.” Klein defended Carville’s comments as appropriate, and the word was put out that I was off CNN air indefinitely. I did not think I had committed a hanging offense. Mark Shields in the past had twice used the same obscenity I employed, once on Crossfire and once on Capital Gang, without comment by management. Klein’s favorite TV critic, Jon Stewart, used much worse language in describing me. Indeed, I received a lot of favorable comment from conservatives who commented how pleased they were that I had finally told Carville how obnoxious he was.

I heard nothing from CNN until Klein called me about a week later. He was none too friendly, suggesting I take off the rest of August, adding we would regroup after Labor Day. I knew it was over. My outburst had taken CNN off the hook, and now it could get rid of me without fear of looking bad for firing their house conservative. Actually, it was a blessing for both CNN and me, and I felt an immediate sense of relief.

I did not hear again from Jon Klein until late September, and he did not waste time in our phone conversation. “We are not going to renew your contract next year,” he told me. The truth was that CNN did not want me to work for it anymore, and I did not want to work for CNN anymore. CNN offered me a generous termination settlement that was not required under my contract, but stipulated that the details be kept secret. I agreed not to “intentionally disparage” CNN, and I believe I have adhered to that agreement.

Sam Feist had always promised that my departure from CNN would be a soft landing and scheduled an extended appearance for me Friday, December 30, on The Situation Room (the new afternoon program). But first there was one more incident connected with the leak case, thanks to my big mouth.

         

ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2005, I traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to deliver my biennial luncheon speech to the John Locke Foundation, a conservative think tank. These appearances had been uneventful, and not a word I uttered had appeared in print. That may be why I threw caution to the winds on the very last question of the q-and-a period following my speech.

The question dealt with the leak case, the first mention of it during my appearance in Raleigh. I declared: “I’m confident the President knows who the source is. I’d be amazed if he doesn’t. So, I say: ‘Don’t bug me. Don’t bug Bob Woodward [who recently had said he also had been told of Valerie Wilson’s identity]. Bug the President as to whether he should reveal who the source is.’” I added that my own role in the case had “snowballed out of proportion” thanks to a “campaign by the Left.” I also charged “extremely bad management of the issue by the White House. Once you give an issue to a special protector, you lose control [over] it.”

To my embarrassment, everything I said was reported in the Raleigh News and Observer the next morning. The story went all over the country, with the White House spokesman pressed for comment. Democrats called on Bush to reveal the name of the leaker.

As luck would have it, Geraldine and I were scheduled to be at the White House for a Christmas party for the media the next evening, December 15. Geraldine thought it might be better to just not show up, but I wanted to go. I had been cut off all the White House briefing lists since the CIA leak case broke, and the Christmas parties were my sole contact with the president. When Geraldine went through the receiving line at White House Christmas parties, Bush always gave her a jocular greeting noting that she was from Hillsboro (not far from his ranch). This time he called her “the Hillsboro Flash.” As for what I said in Raleigh, he told me: “You put me on the spot.” “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” I replied. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

On my CNN farewell appearance, Wolf Blitzer asked me about my comments in Raleigh. “I didn’t think there were any reporters there,” I said, adding: “That was really a dumb thing to say.” Wolf pressed me on this, then trotted out the same tired old questions on the leak case that evoked the same tired old nonanswers from me. Sam Feist had told me the case would be mentioned only briefly in the introduction of what would be a retrospective of my twenty-five years at CNN, and I half believed him. In fact, Blitzer was nearly as adversarial as he had been the last time.

Bruce Morton, an old hand in TV and a real artist (who also was to join Judy Woodruff and me going out the door of CNN), did a beautiful package on me that included this:

He has a nickname, the Prince of Darkness, and likes to cause trouble and stir up strife, he said once…In public, at any rate, they take no prisoners…. His game is hardball. Since he’s nicknamed a prince, I thought about saying goodbye in Shakespeare’s phrase, “Good night, sweet prince.” But, then, I thought, no, Bob would object to sweet, and he would be right.

I had a final thought myself after Wolf finished questioning me:

I want to thank CNN for making this network available to me for twenty-five years. Never censored me once—ever. And I said some outrageous things…. I think I worked hard for CNN, but it was a wonderful opportunity, and I want to thank them.

I wanted to finish a quarter of a century on a positive note, and so did CNN—especially Jim Walton, who was Jon Klein’s boss as head of the CNN Group. He called me in December to propose a CNN farewell party, inviting top officials and politicians. I thanked him but felt I had to tell him that I was going to Fox News Channel, CNN’s bitter competitor, as a contributor. Walton seemed to be taken aback by that, as if he thought I was leaving TV as well as CNN. I said I would prefer a party limited to the people who had worked with me at CNN starting in 1980: executives, broadcasters, producers, directors, cameramen, and makeup artists. I wanted no celebrities. This, I stressed, was not a retirement party.

The party was held January 26, 2006, at Charlie Palmer’s Steakhouse, a swish lobbyist hangout at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue near Capitol Hill. Jim Walton came up from Atlanta for the event, bringing greetings from Ted Turner and Tom Johnson and extravagant praise (calling me a CNN “icon”). Jonathan Klein did not come down from New York, and sent no message. I think we both agreed that was appropriate.

         

IN JULY, Special Counsel Fitzgerald finally gave Jim Hamilton the green light. He was through with me, and I could speak out on the CIA leak case. I promptly wrote a column revealing everything but the identity of Richard Armitage as my primary source. That did not happen until he was clearly identified in Hubris, the anti-Bush screed by journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn. Armitage then belatedly identified himself.

I was exonerated, as signaled by a remarkable Washington Post editorial that suggested Joe Wilson was “the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career.” It concluded: “[Wilson] diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.”

I had to write one more column about the case, on September 14, because of Armitage’s false account of his answer to me when I asked why the CIA sent Wilson to Niger: “I don’t know, but I think his wife worked out there.” I related what he really told me (“His wife works at CIA, and she suggested that he be sent to Niger.” “His wife works at CIA?” I asked. “Yeah, in counterproliferation.”). I concluded: “Armitage’s silence for…2½ years caused intense pain for his colleagues in government and enabled partisan Democrats in Congress to falsely accuse Rove of being my primary source…. Armitage’s tardy self-disclosure is tainted because it is deceptive.”

On September 19, I received a telephone call from Karl Rove to volunteer some information about a column he heard I was about to write. That broke a three-year absence of substantive conversation between us that had been imposed by Rove’s lawyers. I doubted that our intimacy ever could be restored, but his unsolicited call confirmed that the case was closed.

         

THE BEST EFFORTS of the White House and the Republican leadership were unable to prevent the 2006 midterm elections from being a referendum on an unpopular war and an unpopular president. The day before the election, I reported in the column that the outcome would be “either bad or very bad” for Republicans. More specifically, the Evans-Novak Political Report forecast (based mainly on the work of my reporter, David Freddoso) the Democrats gaining twenty House seats, losing control there for the first time in twelve years, and five Senate seats, one short of a majority.

It was worse than that for Republicans, giving up control of both houses (with loss of thirty seats in the House and six in the Senate). The Republicans looked dead in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and California. They seemed to be healthy only in the states of the old Confederacy. The national electoral map looked like the mirror image of what it was in the 1920s, when Democrats were confined to the Solid South. The long, slow realignment of the past thirty-eight years had finally run its course. At age seventy-five I was still around to report a new phase of American political history.